HP to use 100% renewable energy to power Texas data centres

Tech giant Hewlett-Packard (HP) will use 100 per cent renewable energy to power its five Texas data centres.

HP will buy 112 megawatts of wind power from a SunEdison wind farm in Texas as part of a new 12-year contract, according to a company statement.

The deal will see HP reach its 2020 greenhouse gas emissions reduction target five years ahead of schedule and join Facebook, Walmart, Dow Chemical, and Microsoft in buying wind power from Texas.

HP data centres cover approximately 1.5 million square feet in Texas and the firm’s wind power purchase will cover all the energy requirements of these operations, equivalent of powering 42,600 homes annually.

The deal means the amount of wind bought from Texas through corporate power purchase agreements in the past three years has reached 1 GW.

The announcement also means that SunEdison will begin construction on the 300 MW South Plains II wind farm.

Texas has a total installed wind power capacity of over 14 GW, making up 21 per cent of the 66 GW installed in the U.S., and leads the country in wind power nameplate generating capacity.

The wind power boom in Texas is partly due to the Competitive Renewable Energy Zone (CREZ) transmission lines installed in 2014, as well as good wind resources and relatively cheap land.

The new 345 kV CREZ transmission lines include 186 projects across Texas that help transmit energy from wind farm sites to the areas that have the greatest need for power.

Gabi Zedlmayer, HP chief progress officer, said: “Environmental considerations figure into all of our IT and real estate decisions that we’re making… It’s still rather a complex process over all — we can’t just go and purchase the energy that we want. To get to this type of an agreement, this has taken us the better part of a year.”